What did you expect? Are you shocked that Mittens made lightof a rather ridiculous eve mail? Or are you more that shocked that the sentiments were expressed in such a public forum? The amount of self-righteousness from the eve community Moral Right is incredible. Pat Robertsons abound. While you lot are busy crucifying Mittens, you seem to have forgotten that this was a CCP sanctioned event. CCP should have been in control of everything. Was the Q&A session not scheduled? Was it not at the the convention center? Were there not CCP employees there that could have intervened? Had there been actually any (legal) wrong doing here (aside from terribly insensitive comments) the lawsuit would have been directed at CCP as hosts of the event, so I find hilarious that the Pubwaffe at large haven’t turned their collective anger to CCP as well.

Mr. Mike has shown some surprise at the STOG that was given last night, mainly that Mittani has not turned into the humble ever altruist Moral Majority [JESUS] wants him to be. What you all should be surprised about is that Mittani was genuinely sorry, even to Goons, for what he said. What you should not be surprised about is that Mittani is still as smug and arrogant as ever. These are qualities that make him one of the most interesting personalities in eve and get the great goon machine into motion.

A broader question that deserves looking at is who is this game designed for and who is it actually for? The ESRB rating says T for Teen, but that’s really who should be playing this game. This is a game for adults (18+). Look at local chat the majority of the time, it’s full of people trying to pull of the best lies or people using brilliant communcations skills such as “Fuck you noob” etc. The latter example is an extremely prevalent attitude and reply in this game and that is considered as adult language, no? Certainly not within the guidelines a T rating. (Obviously this doesn’t comply with EULA but seriously, EULA?). Now lets look at fanfest. It’s several days of glorified drunkeness. It has keynote speeches that ask the crowd to say “Fuck Yeah” three times to watch a trailer that will on youtube mere minutes later. Yes Moral Majority, you certainly have the high ground here and mittani’s 30 day ban was completely warranted given what I’ve previously stated.

I’m not saying Mittani’s comments were appropriate, clearly they were not and he has sincerely apologized. The massive amount of self-righteousness is amazing given how many times I’ve seen “Goons need to die” or some variation of that from the same subset of Eve that were horrified by the Mittani’s comments. Am I missing the difference between Mittani’s comments and the literally thousands of characters that have uttered those words over the years? In words and attitude there is not; in fact, The Mittani’s comments can be taken far more jokingly than most Pubwaffe members’. So unless you are trying to take political advantage of the situation (then by all means, beat your breastplate of righteousness), try to not be a retard for five seconds.

I’m creating an early spring for myself and taking a new direction for one of my characters. For a while now I’ve trained nothing but minmatar and gallente frigate and have put all navigation (related to subcaps) to V and am within a few months of having “perfect” gunnery support skills. For the most part, he’s spent his existance spinning around lowsec while in Legion of Darkwind, but alas no more. He has dropped roles and is heading to RvB, specifically Blue Republic. In a few hours, I’ll have my app in and will hopefully be in corp and losing rifters and tristans by saturday. I’ve got a shit ton of frigates fit up and will start training cruiser hulls in a month or so, right about the time I start to heavily FC (if things go according to plan).

I’ve missed FCing. Quite a bit actually. Admittadely, I’m terrible at solo PvP and am certainly no expert in fleet operations but I think I do a fair job. The guys in Order of the Void will probably tell you that I’m extremely good at getting them to lose their ships while somehow managing to disengage from the fight and live. In Goons there is ample opportunity to lead fleets, but I’m still rather disoriented in 0.0 even though I’ve been out there for over a year now. I’m a twee frustrated with myself for not taking more intiative on it and it is something that I’m looking to remedy, we’ll see how it goes. I’ve missed the E-Uni days of small gangs every night without having to worry about 50 carriers dropping on your head and spoiling the fun, at the same time I love being part of the obvious large story of Eve. Eve is one of the few games where you can have your cake and eat it too. Here’s to cake.

Wardec mechanics. Giant, broad title right? Unfortunately the below thoughts will be more venting than and sort of creative solution finding.

Here’s a little story. Skerrit’s alliance, Order of the Void, was wardecced by a merc corp, The Ghost Division. In repsonse, The Void hired the mercs from the Double Tap alliance to fight them. There was a big showdown when Ghost was destroying one of our alliance POS’ and D-Tap showed up with a bunch of guys.

Ghost used some very creative mechanic manipulation and had everyone without roles switch to the corp that had hired them to wardec us (Violent Love, who was already at war with us). This is where it is interesting, since D-Tap hadn’t been hired to dec Violent Love, they didn’t so there was no way they could have engaged them without mighty concord coming along. In the end the POS was lost as our alliance couldn’t get enough dps around to drive them off (out of our prime time). but this situation did get me thinking about the tactic used.

The frustrating thing on our end was that even if D-Tap would’ve wardecced Violent Love, they couldn’t engage in combat for 24 hours and our assets would have been lost anyway. In this case, the mechanics stopped us from being able to call in the help we needed. I suppose we could have had the D-Tap guys join one of our corps, but should wardecs really be reduced to such mechanic manipulation? As stated, the guys in Ghost were rather creative in their solution to the problem, respect to them for it. But the whole thing just struck me as incredibly frustrating. With CCP’s recent allusion to revamping wardecs, I’m eager to read upcoming dev blogs about the issue.

I finally made it through the CSM minutes from the December Summit. Crikey! That was a lot of :words:, I found myself getting lost somewhere near the end of the art department segment. I did find a few things interesting though. The first was that CCP appeared a bit cold to the CSM when talking about the continuing influence of the CSM. The exact quote is :

“CCP confirmed that no change was planned for how the CSM fit into EVE’s development as a result of the reorg, the CSM is a very good sounding board for CCP and will be continued to be used as such. The value of the CSM has been seen in the past and there is no reason to disregard that fact on CCP’s behalf.”

Given the writing style of the minutes, once could take that to be just an emotionless statement, but I am a bit suspicious that the statement is worded in a cold way rather than an emotionless way. We shall see when the next CSM enters. I for one have been very impressed with the CSM as an organizing force this go around, even with the ~evil~ nullsec agenda. I hope that CCP recognizes the value of the current iteration of the CSM and isn’t simply paying lip service to them. While many have thought this CSM to be controversial or unrepresentative of the Eve community’s wants, this CSM has done more for the “game” in terms of iteration than any previous CSM. Many features that wouldn’t have seen the light of day were fast tracked in order to “fix” broken parts of the game. Say what you will about Mitanni, Death, and Vile Rat, but they’ve brought fixes to severely broken areas of the game while making sure they are parts that the entire Eve player base can enjoy.

Back to the minutes. I loved the idea of a loyalty program, mostly for selfish reasons. Admittedly though it doesn’t make much sense. The player base is extremely loyal once they’ve passed that dreaded three year mark, according to CCP. I certainly believe it given the number of 2008 and older characters i see about. So a loyalty program would be nice as a “thank you” to the players but wouldn’t do a whole ton to increase player retention as a whole. Either you are hooked and play till your wife threatens to leave you or you quit within the first few years. One great idea that CCP has been tossing about was the Master Account. I have three separate accounts, I would have more if I could afford it, but logging into all those accounts is a pain in the ass. I’d love to log into one and service the all three accounts with one username and password. The less work for the player, the better. I really hope this comes to fruition.

The economy section was interesting but had math and :words: which meant it totally over my head. There’s a reason why I pvp instead of playing the market: I’m a relative idiot. I know, good reader, “That can’t be!” Quit gasping, it’s true. Similarly to the economy discussion was the discussion about PLEX. A notable section says:

”

CSM also pointed out that ISK is not tied to PLEX in any fashion, and the amount of ISK does not change in the overall economy due to PLEX use. Therefore the CSM wanted to know more about the reasons why CCP wanted to be able to react, and what they would do, to price fluctuations on the PLEX market – barring of course a possible steep decline in subscriber numbers should players not be able to afford PLEX for ISK.

CCP noted that in monetary theory it is possible to have inflation, or deflation, in an economic system even though the amount of money in the system is stable. This is due to the velocity of money – how often cash is changing hands. Therefore it is very important not only to monitor money supply in EVE but rather the entire economic value produced within the system, and imported into the economic system via PLEX. A large influx of economic value via PLEX could potentially have damaging effect on the economy, at least in the short and medium term.”

CCP’s reply was then backed up with the Quantity Theory of Money. While I’m not an economist at all, I disagree with CCP’s desire to intervene in PLEX prices simply because of this criticism of the QTM:

“While mainstream economists agree that the quantity theory holds true in the long run, there is still disagreement about its applicability in the short run. Critics of the theory argue that money velocity is not stable and, in the short-run, prices are sticky, so the direct relationship between money supply and price level does not hold.”

I would also point out that CCP is most likely falling for the money illusion. ISK has a “real value” that represents what it x amount of ISK can actually purchase. This “real value” rises and falls depending on the market and overall amount of ISK actively trading hands. If a 60 day PLEX costs 2 Billion ISK, CCP would most certainly view that as an excessive price for a PLEX, but the price would have risen that high due to high volumes of ISK trading hands and the driving down of ISK’s “real value”. All that poorly linked economic theory to say, I think CCP “actively” adjusting prices of any sort is a bad idea. I certainly think that restricting or opening the ISK flood gates is a great way to respond to inflation or deflation just as a central bank would do, but all these adjustments must be made carefully and with consideration for the sand box aspect of the game.

I really liked the supercapital logistics discussions. The “spool up” idea for jumpdrives is brilliant as it provides both a useful game mechanic and potential lore for the eve universe. Living in 0.0 for over a year now, I’ve seen firsthand the pure portability of supercaps and its quite silly how quickly they can move from one end of the universe to the other given the proper coordination.

Thumbs up on destructable outposts. Great idea, get on it CCP. Let me urge them in this: If you develop destructable outposts, you much make owning one all the more valuable. Put more worth into having them, otherwise you’ll find people simply setting up lots of POS’s and living out of those. I suppose this all goes back into making sovereignty valuable on its own. Technetium is obviously the most lucrative game in Eve right now, but its not tied to Sov. You can take advantage of moons regardless of Sov. Obviously holding Sov makes it far easier to have and to hold those moons (till xxxdeathxxx do we part), but again they are not dependent on sov. I’ve no solutions here, just trying to make the echo louder and more redundant.

In the Game Balancing section, there are several fantastic ideas that CCP has devoted some thought to. The first is making T1 frigates and cruisers more useful. They specifically mentioned making cruisers speedier than battlecruisers as an example of T1 cruisers being bypassed. While I do agree that a bit of a boost to T1 ships would be nice, CCP has to realize that there are always going to be “useless” ships to certain players. I personally passed over regular cruisers rather quickly. IIRC, I was into a Hurricane within a few months. Now think about that, I bypassed a stabber and rupture within a few months and really haven’t touched them since. Part of the reason is that fitting a T1 cruiser with T2 mods increases the cost ten fold. That’s probably the highest cost increase in the entire game, so it’s simply not worth it for me to use a rupture that costs me ~30mil fully fit, when I can pay a negligible 15 more million and get a fully fit hurricane that has vastly improved abilities. It’s not so much that these ships suck, but that once you quit using meta 1 mods, the price becomes unjustifiable (except for the ~lulz~ fleets).

Electronic Attack Ships are briefly mentioned for being allowed to use ECM mods on capital ships. That’s just stupid unless you create specific mods for those ships that are useful. The main problem with the EAS is their massive sig radius’ relative to other frigate sized ships. There’s no point in flying something that has little chance of getting away while not providing a strong incentive to do so. The EAS frigs are certainly fun gimmick ships, but again probably need a complete revamping instead of being given an even bigger gimmick as “capital tacklers” or something.

Seemingly the most controversial point in the CSM minutes has been the proposed nerf to the drake. The proposition is to remove the resist and kinetic missile damage bonus, which makes sense. It has always been a ridiculous brick tank (I’ve personally used a >100k ehp drake as bait) and to see that changed and become more focused will be great. OH NOES WHAT ABOUT MY PVE DRAKE??? Get over it and grit your teeth for faction BS’s and other more expensive mission toys that you can lose hilariously like me. This change will give supreme reign to the nanodrakes though, especially if you can expect >100k engagement ranges with 400dps. Goodbye my sweet Cerberus, you’re about to become completely useless now.

The last notable thing to me was the mention of new missile and explosion animations. “Anime style missile swarm” sounds very appealing. Give me Gundam missiles dammit! This all is a very good thing because the missiles and explosions are about as lame as can be. Think about how many things explode in Eve every minute and we have the same shitty “Death start ring of doom” explosion.

All in all, the minutes were very encouraging. I’m excited to see how some of these ideas (most certainly the terrible ones) makes it into the game and how other ideas (the great ones) disappear.

On a completely different note, I got into a Cerberus last night. I have no idea why I though flying a sniping missile ship was a great idea, its not. So don’t do it. Here’s a little story for your amusement though. I get my ship fit up in a fitting that I’m relatively happy with. It has a targeting range of ~140km and a missile range of 180k. I rolled down to Oijanen quickly to sit off the hisec gate. I first warped off to a safe spot in system and then to my sniping spot. Upon landing I found my cap was at 5% when I had over 80% midwarp so clearly the warp hadn’t taken it down and I was cap stable without my MWD and even with it, had a cap time of 40 seconds. I waited a couple of seconds for my cap to recharge and then warped back to my safe. Once I landed at the safe, my cap was fine. I did this three or four times and lost nearly all of my cap upon landing on the gate. The unlucky 4th time, I landed on the gate and some BricK sQuAD. guys landed right there and proceeded to murder me. My poor Cerb had lasted less than 10 minutes in this world. Damn.

I am a terrible pilot, space friends.

On top of that, we got hit up by some more BricK sQuAD. guys in another system. We’d been moving some freighters around and one of our escort guys got caught by their crow. I warped in with my daredevil hoping to kill the crow before the other guys showed up, but right as the crow popped a cane showed up followed by a stiletto and dram. I was sunk. While this was going on, I stupidly warped my Falcon in too (just in case losing my daredevil wasn’t enough lost isk). I cried into my pint glass the rest of the night. Which was filled with Bier Brewery’s Kolsch! It was such a lovely example of a delicate style. The ale that was a lager. Goodbye spacefriends.

I’ve had a pretty decent last week. I finally got my computer up and running in no small part to two goons (and Rose Hulman CS grads). Me and Randomus_Namus and Sarnell Argento were meeting up for an evening of debauchery (which is really the only kind of night goons can have right) and general drunken buffoonery when all of our plans were thwarted by computer after computer shitting itself. For example, prior to going to Sarnell’s place, my desktop was finally working. I’d logged into Eve and was happy with the performance, but when I got to Sarnell’s the damn thing had the BIOS problem again. He switched some shit around as far as actual SATA ports used and messed with some stuff in the BIOS and viola it worked. While my computer was busy reshitting itself, Randomus’ was basically vomiting out of its CD drive. In the end, I think Randomus used my spare laptop and it was so late and we were so drunk that we didn’t do anything besides shit up Jabber and mumble. It was a good time regardless.

I’ve barely had time since then to log in and do anything. The Order has been dead as far as PvP stuff goes, so I think its about time to schedule another “Skerrit’s Gonna Get Drunk and PvP” op. In other news, this very night, a new episode of Local Spam is going to be recorded. Fortunately I have plenty of beer and water, but I’ll probably just stick with bourbon and water due to the embarrassment of drunkenness last episode. Peace out e’ryone.

I’ve just been enlightened by my friend Pyrotech03 about the whole drama of the Eve Online Bloggers portal going down soon and Black Claw letting the domain fees lapse. While I certainly think that Black Claw’s personal “house cleaning” is a great thing, I don’t think that letting the domain die is a good thing. Practically there are several ways to avoid losing this site. The easiest would be to set up a donation drive for BC, people could donate a few bucks here or there and voila, the site stays open. Goons just finished up their annual server drive and in the span of a few days collected a little under $5000 since the start of the year. Yes you read that right, FIVE GRAND. I would imagine that donations would come in rather quickly to cover the domain fees. Another option is to simply transfer the domain stuff to another interested community partner, obviously payment info and stuff would need to be changed but that guarantees that the site doesn’t go down for a single day and takes the responsibility off BC for anything that goes wrong with the site. Then there’s the combination of the two, which would most likely be the best option. Transfer the domain to another party and they can raise the funds via the community if the individual does not wish to pay for it out of pocket. With all that BC certainly can and should do what he wants. It would also be stupid for the community to apply pressure on him as that would most likely push him further away from the Eve community.

Seismic Stan wrote an interesting post on the whole subject a week ago. For the most part I agree with his implications that CCP is showing favoritism towards certain eve “celebrities”. Let me get a couple of things out before I go on my rant; 1) I am not jealous of the popular eve personalities 2) I do not give 1 single fuck about site traffic 3) I give even less fucks (read: negative fucks) about whether or not people respect or value my opinion. I know very little about this game and my analysis is even worse than my knowledge. /commence rant.

The whole eve celebrity thing is a bit ridiculous. Take a step back and realize that the people behind the avatar are simply people. For they most part, they go to work and come home to family or friends and spend time playing a game. With that said, I do scratch my head as to how/why CCP picks certain people to be highlighted. For example: Mintchip. I’ve no fucking idea why CCP would spotlight anything she does. I’m not a mintchip fan because I don’t think her content is that great, its mediocre at best (yes lulz, making my content terrible). She covers far too much general video game content to be spotlighted as well. Just to clarify my position, I’m not against Mintchip in general, but only in her celebrity status in connection to Eve. There are numerous other examples to cite, but I’ll just stop with her. Mainly because I’m a massive, throbbing chauvinist.

If the community is frustrated with CCP’s spotlighting, then let’s create our own. Just as inside the game, the most compelling content is always created by the player base so the player base needs to take up the mantle yet again. We had CK and BC doing this stuff, notice a problem? They’re individuals. Are individuals in Eve typically successful? Certainly not as successful as groups working together. Players often burn out and leave the game; it just happens. It would be nice to see the a communal site created and run by several people and funded by the people taking advantage of its services. It wouldn’t be too difficult to do given the camaraderie of many in the tweetfleet and the blogging community. The main obstacle is finding those willing to take the responsibility.

As a side note, I find it rather stupid that there are free “press accounts”. Eve is a good enough game with passionate enough players that CCP need not give away “press accounts” to bloggers. Hell, CCP makes it easy to play their game for free anyway.